“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” doesn’t even begin to describe a small, bright galaxy hovering at the edge of the observable universe. The little cluster of stars, called GN-z11, is the most distant object astronomers have spotted: It existed when the universe was just 400 million years old.

“This is a very early galaxy,” says UC-Santa Cruz’s Garth Illingworth, who described the galaxy in The Astrophysical Journal. “We’re looking back 13.4 billion years, through 97 percent of all time, to the galaxy when it was forming.”

Yep, it took 13.4 billion years for light from the galaxy to zoom through the universe and collide with the Hubble Space Telescope. But that